In celebration of that technical feat (okay, I just had to click on the right setting), I and several other participating authors are doing a blog tour. We’ll each present our readers with an excerpt, and then tell you why we are sharing it. So, here’s a bit of a story I want to share with you today. Enjoy!

I made it home in the end. Home was my office, above a Chinese pawnbrokers. At least I had my own front door at street level, with my own sign on it and everything. The sign said “Don Drake, Hieromancer,” in nice big gold letters. Well it had done, anyway – some wag had spray-painted out the world “Hieromancer” and written “wanker” underneath it instead.

I’m sharing this with you, because “wanker” caught me off guard when I first read the passage above and it just cracked me up. I could see the letters scrawled on the sign, and the thing is, this isn’t our first introduction of Drake. This is a bit into the story and, frankly, he is a wanker! I could easily see his neighbor doing that to his sign after some trouble Drake brought home got out of hand. I think the author did an excellent job of painting Drake’s world, and the rest of the story delivers an entertaining, surreal tale of magic and mayhem in the heart of London.

My blog post got a bit long so I didn’t want to share my “excerpt” there. So I will here:

“Irwin imagined he retained the greatest collection of literature in the world. He had all the classics, the books everyone wanted to have read but no one wanted to read. Mark Twain said that—Irwin had his works too. Plenty of non-fiction, history and science mostly—just the sort of knowledge a struggling new mankind would crave. Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan being the new Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He had vast collections of mysteries, and crime novels that could assist in the foundation of a new code of law. In his kitchen he kept the horror: Lovecraft, the rest of King, Poe, Barker, and Koontz—the parables of motivation and morality. In the grotto were the thrillers, lessons in individualism and tenacity, but it was in his living room that he kept his real treasures. No other room in his home could hold the two most significant branches of literary achievement, what Irwin understood to be the pinnacle of all man’s art—science fiction and fantasy. The possible and the impossible.”

What I liked about this passage is that in most literary circles science fiction and fantasy are constantly seen by looking down the noses by those of “great literature” I liked how Irwin has 180 view.